When the Swedish furniture giant Ikea first opened its shop in Beijing in 1999, it hoped Beijingers would embrace its Scandinavian style of minimalism. It achieved its goal.

Danish freelance furniture designer Thomas Winther-Rasmussen, 33, said it's the emphasis of light in the rooms that makes Scandinavian design and furniture different from others.

In Scandinavia, it gets dark many hours earlier in winter while in summer the night shortens.

Furniture in a typical Scandinavian home reflects this. The furniture would be made of blond woods, like beech, ash, pine and oak, instead of dark woods often used in southern European countries. And the fabrics are natural materials, like linen and cotton.

Winther said the expression "Scandinavian design" is just a marketing term.

It refers to a certain design movement in Scandinavia that started in the 1950s.

It is also a kind of democratization of furniture with the aim of making the well-designed furniture available to the masses, he said, adding "something that IKEA in Sweden and FDB furniture in Denmark have adopted".

The design of the furniture would generally be light-colored, airy and minimalist with sleek lines and little decoration.

"The designs are created out of a simple basic idea," Winther said.

"For example, a chair, the designer has an idea for the construction and way of sitting, and then he would work with the lines of the chair to achieve this lightness and simplicity."

Classic Scandinavian furniture designers are generally craftsmen who have a very good feeling for the structural capabilities and the quality of the wood.

"This approach is part of reason why the Scandinavian designs stay so timeless," he said.

Winther also believes that the ideas behind the Scandinavian design reflect the Scandinavian society.

"We are quite open, with democracy and relatively little corruption," he said.

"I believe the simplicity, honesty and lightness of our furniture reflects the designers' progressive thinking and liberation of the mind."

While some Chinese buy famous Danish designer Arne Jakobsen's egg chair at 100,000-120,000 yuan each, some Chinese people prefer Italian or French styles.

Winther believes that Chinese people tend to look for something that is more elaborate and with more decoration.

"There is still no real appreciation of the basic and natural among Chinese," he said.

"But maybe Ikea will change that."